


take sides in divided cells

by bibliocratic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Martin and Jon becoming the soft domestic middle-aged men they were always going to, Parent-Child Relationship, difficult conversations, parental abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:47:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: Martin's father comes back into his life.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 44
Kudos: 678





	take sides in divided cells

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted to tumblr, written for a prompt. Set in a nebulous post-160 AU. 
> 
> Because of the topic of this one, there are content warnings, found in the end notes.

“And if you want me to call – ”

“I know, I'll send a message.”

“And if you don't feel safe, or you want out of there, there doesn't _have_ to be a reason – ”

“Jon.”

“I'll have the phone on me in case – ”

“ _Jon,_ ” Martin snaps, and his voice is saw-toothed, edged with an irritation that serves as a defensive carapace to his nerves. “It's – it's _fine,_ he's probably not going to be there anyway, this whole thing is going to be a waste, s-so would you _please_ stop fussing, for – ” He releases a grunt of annoyance but tries to muster some calm, breathing with heavy huffing sounds. “I just need... this _bloody Christ,_ this tie – ”

Martin's made a knot-eyed strangle-hold mess of it in his rush, and he tugs angrily at it, making it worse.

“Do you want me to – ?”

“No, I don't! Would you just let me do it! God forbid I be able to do it myself.”

Martin's voice raises to a shout that dips into a hollow of passive aggressive sniping. Jon stills, steps back from where he's been moving into Martin's space and crowding him, and tries not too feel too hurt, pushes down the knee-jerk cutting responses that will neither be helpful or deserved.

Martin tussles with the tie for a few more vicious seconds, his smart shirt having been tucked, untucked and re-tucked again and taking on a rumpled, disturbed pattern. He finally breathes out again, a heavy, weighted breath, closing his eyes. He takes a few calculated, noticeably deeper inhales and exhales that Jon recognises as the deep breathing his therapist taught him. Jon lets him tide through it.

“I'm sorry for snapping,” Martin says lowly, roughly. “I didn't mean – I'm not handling this very well. That's no reason to take it out on you.”

“Considering how many times I was short with you, you probably still have a surplus until we're even close to equal,” Jon replies, trying for levity. Martin wrings the abused tie miserably in his hands, and Jon wishes that this was easier, that this wasn't drawing out all of Martin's embedded poisons, his anxieties he's long laboured to conquer.

“Can you – Will you help? With the tie?” Martin says in a smaller voice, and Jon takes a step into Martin's unhappy orbit, and removes it gently from his hands.

“Of course,” he replies. “If you want to wear it. But you – Martin, you look good without it. And you hate ties.”

The last time he'd worn one was at his mum's funeral, Jon both knows and Knows. He hadn't been able to tie it then either.

“I want – ” Martin says, looking frustrated when the words don't come as easily as he desires. “It looks professional, yeah? Smart? I don't want to look – do I look like I'm, I dunno, trying too hard? It's – huh – it's only a cafe, right, not the bloody Ritz or something – will it, do you think it'll look too desperate?”

Jon touches Martin's arm with his hand. Martin's fidgeting with his shirt sleeves, the buttons at the cuffs, keeps tugging them down like he's worried they're not long enough. He twists and twists and twists his wedding ring and bleeds out nerves like a weather front stagnating in fog, and Jon selfishly wants him to cancel.

“You'll look fine,” he replies. “Smart, and put-together. And I'll think you look handsome, but that's by the by.” That coaxes Martin's lips to twitch. “But you don't... you don't have to wear it, if it's going to... if you're uncomfortable in it. Especially if you think not wearing it will make him disapprove or some nonsense.”

Martin huffs a sound that's the verbal equivalent of a long-suffering eye-roll.

“Spooky mind-reader strikes again, huh.”

"Fear my psychic powers,” Jon dead-pans, and Martin chuffs another one of those aborted half-laughs. Then, quieter, softer. “Want me to help with it?”

“I – I think I'll leave it,” Martin responds finally, with a nod to himself. “It's a Costa anyway, I'm just going to look like a hipster anyway in this shirt.”

“It's that and the beard,” Jon agrees, rubbing his hand at the thick scratchy weave of it until Martin bats his hand away with a 'get off you'. “Do you need your umbrella?”

“ 's only ten minutes down the road, should be alright.”

“You get caught in a downpour, it's your own fault.”

Martin's lips do actually quirk in a smile then, finding the grooves of their light-hearted bickering as a comforting oft-replayed melody.

“Your romantic soul never ceases to astound me.”

“You didn't have to marry me.”

“Not like any one else was going to do the job.”

“How noble and public-spirited of you.”

Jon kisses Martin's lips briefly, raising himself up on socked tip-toes. Martin's hand slots into his, faintly trembling.

“Whatever you decide, I'll support your decision,” he says in the tight woven space of their bodies. “Even if this isn't what you want, or even if it is.”

Martin nods, and returns a dry, bristly kiss in return before he heads out.

It starts spitting with rain not a minute later.

* * *

Jon has not been blessed with an abundance of patience. Martin's meeting is at half two, but he checks his phone at obsessive intervals, watching the screen lighten and the clock on analogue mode work through the grinding seconds. In case Martin's changed his mind. In case he wants out, doesn't want to do this. In case he was stood up, or is sat alone because there was some problem with traffic, or, or, or.

Jon, half-heartedly, tries a great number of things to distract himself, and to avoid any instances of Knowing. After an hour, he's given channel-hopping a go – watching five minutes of a mid-afternoon western, and then ten minutes of a reality show about buying houses on the coast and renovating them. (Martin loves these types of programmes, and in the spirit of them is trying to doggedly renovate the front hall. Meaning that any time Jon wants to go to the front door, he has to pick his way over old blankets thrown down to protect the flooring from paint drips, Martin's small forest of tester pots and paint pots and drying brushes).

_Martin's got a window seat – the window misted with condensation, some child has imprinted a pudgy hand as a calling card – has ordered a mocha – over-sugared, tacky in his mouth, he regrets the choice immediately –_

_SHUT UP,_ Jon fumes at himself, and tries to read, manages a few pages before he's struck with the frisson of Martin's spiking anxiety every time the ding of the cafe door pipes up, and stomps into the kitchen to occupy his mind by making himself an unappetizing lunch that he doesn't even want to eat.

His phone remains silent. Jon fights the powerful urge to send a brief check-up message, a little _everything going ok?_ but stops himself. Martin's going to have enough on his plate.

Jon frets and waits for him to come home.

* * *

There's the plaintive squeak of the front gate (Martin will need to oil it again), and Jon sits up from where he's been petting the cat and poorly playing one of Martin's hand-held console games. He's been on the same level for about an hour now, and stubbornness is preventing him from giving it up as a lost cause.

The pad of two footsteps.

“You've – the flowers are nice. That you've got growing.”

“Thanks. It's not really – it's more Jon than me. He's pretty green-fingered.” The footsteps peter out. “So – er, well, this is me, heh. Close by.”

“Time really flew, huh.”

“Yeah. T-thanks for the, thanks for the coffee – ”

“Don't mention – ”

“ – and for the walk back – ”

“ – You can keep the umbrella, if you – ”

“N-no, it's, it's fine.”

The conversation stalls and splutters like an engine with the wrong fuel. Jon's moved out into the hallway, the cat restless but demanding in his arms, and sees the blurred bulk of Martin's stiff shoulders in the frosted glass pane of their front door, set high like he's shoved his hands into his pockets.

Jon skirts around the paint pots to get nearer.

“So,” the other voice – and it's so similar, strikes the same gulleys and furrows, the stop-and-start of thoughts eking their way out into expression, and it wrong-foots Jon to hear it, the ill-matching echo of it. “I – I'll see you again? If you, that is – I really liked... It was good. To catch up, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Martin says, and he sounds wrung out, straining on some mental rack he's internalised. “It was. Yeah. It was good to see you.”

“You want to do coffee again, sometime?”

“I – er. Maybe. Maybe.”

The first fuzz of hurt creeps to moss over the over-eager nervousness of the other voice. “Oh. Er, yeah. S-sure. That's... it's not a problem. Why, why maybe?”

Martin's hackles go up defensively. “I'm not sure, alright?”

“Was everything ok?”

“I guess relatively?”

“What's that mean?”

“Relatively as in, it's been thirty years, there's a few things to iron out after all that. Hence the, y'know, the maybe.”

“Right,” comes the response. “I am – you know I am _trying_ here.”

Martin's voice goes low and flat and judgemental.

“And how long until you lose interest this time?”

There's a punch of silence. The cat buts against Jon's chin. Through the vague blurring of the glass, Martin shifts in that way of his, when he says something he wishes he hasn't, but he makes no move to take it back.

Half beseeching, half reproachful: “That's not fair, Marty.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“It's _Martin,_ ” Martin replies, blistering with something bubbling to the forefront. “It's Martin, not Marty. I'm not – I'm not a child any more, so you can just – just drop that.” He scoffs a breath, and it's hard and hurt and deliberate. “And no, it wasn't fair. But neither was you leaving. So guess we're equal.”

“I – I tried to explain,” the other man starts, a heat of his own starting to shade indignant.

“And it was _bollocks –_ ”

“It's the truth!”

“It wasn't good enough!”

“Your mother, she was – ”

“She was ill! She was sick and you knew, you _knew_ she was just going to get sicker, and so you cut your losses and you legged it.”

“It wasn't like that – ”

“I was eight!” Martin snarls, and there's no pausing in his words any more, no careful consideration, it's a scatter-gun of words he's had secured in his chest for a long time now. “What the fuck sort of parent leaves an eight year old in that sort of house, with that sort of responsibility? What the hell kind of a life did you think I'd have?!”

“She had – you had aunts and uncles! They were, nearby, they were always cluttering up the house, popping round. I thought – I thought if, when she got really bad, they'd take you in!”

“She cut everyone out! What a stupid – you knew her! She hated anything that felt like pity, she was proud and she didn't want anyone to see her as she got worse. You think she'd have accepted someone implying she couldn't care for her son? No. And eventually it was – it was only us, and you know what, she _hated_ me for it. Because I looked so much like you! Because everything I did, everything I _ever_ did was just a reminder of how much she hated you for leaving.”

“I didn't – ” The response is regret-mired, apologetic, but Martin doesn't want to hear it. “I couldn't have known that...”

“No,” Martin replies, his voice all venom and hurt. “But it's not like you checked, did you? Pop in, see how I was doing. A visit o-or a letter in the post, o-or _something!_ Christ, you didn't even come to the bloody funeral!”

“I.. No one told me! I found out she'd... she'd passed about a month back. I swear, Marty – Martin, sorry. I swear, I didn't know.”

“And now here you are.”

“I wanted to – I wanted to make amends! To be a better, a better father to you.”

“I'm nearly forty, _dad,_ ” Martin snipes unkindly, his throat thick. “What makes you think I need you now?” He sniffs, his words damper than he'd like. “Thirty years is a long time to wait to try and play happy families again.”

“Martin, I. Look, I had a lot of problems. Back then. For a long time. I'm not saying them as an excuse – ”

“Then don't say them,” Martin cuts him off. “I don't – I don't want to hear them. I... just. Don't.”

The conversation dies abruptly. There's a horrible, terminal sort of quiet to it.

“I'm going to go,” Martin says, his tone sanded down to quiet exhaustion. “I've got – Jon'll be waiting and I – I can't do this any more.”

“Right,” Kenneth Blackwood replies with an equal tone. “I'm staying, I'm nearby if you want to – I hope to see you again, Martin.”

Martin doesn't reply. Jon has enough warning of the looming shadow in the door to skitter back as Martin uses his key to twist the lock open.

His face is ruddy, splotchy with patches of red. His eyes wet.

“Guess you heard some of that, yeah?” he bites out bitterly on seeing Jon, tugging off his coat.

“Some,” Jon admits honestly, and Martin shakes his head like he's trying to knock something loose, throws his coat over the banister head, pulling off his scarf and balling it up and chucking it in the corner by the door like it's wronged him.

“What a fucking – It was a mistake, I knew I _knew_ it was a bad idea, me and my _stupid bloody –_ playing the bleeding heart _idiot_ again as per fucking usual.”

“Did it, did go badly?” Jon asks, putting the cat down and skirting the edges of Martin's return, watching him pull off his shoes unlaced and slam them into the shoe pile into the corner.

“Absolutely fabulous!” he responds with a false bitter cheer that tinges yellowed and sick. He's not calming down. His hand threading through his hair, his face continuing to redden with an angry heat, eyes welling up. “He's so bloody sincere and apologetic and what the – what am I supposed to do with that now? Where were all his sorries then, where _was_ he when I wanted to hear them?”

Martin plows on, clearly not wanting answers.

“A-and he was so interested, wanted to see our wedding pictures, and kept asking so so many questions like it was a job interview or something – what are you doing? What do you like doing? What are your hobbies? How long have you and Jon been together? – a-and, like, I couldn't help thinking that it's none of his – he wasn't _there,_ he doesn't _get_ to be all friendly like he didn't just walk out. And! And then!” Martin's voice rises to a furious damp crest, throwing his hands about. “Then he wants to share! He had pictures on him and his new wife and new kids – a-and mum, she always, she always said he hadn't wanted a family, hadn't wanted to be a dad, didn't want the responsibility that'd fall on him when she got sick. But he was so happy! So I don't – what am I meant to think of that? I don't know, I mean, was it lies she told me, how much was the truth, and how much did she twist like she did everything else?”

Martin sniffs loudly. “He got married a _year_ after he left mum, and they're still together. His other kids are finishing uni or they've got cushy jobs in the financial district, and h-he was showing me and he sounded so... god, he was so _proud_ of them.” Martin wipes at his eyes. “S-so that's, that's just _great._ ”

“Martin...” Jon starts, despairing, listening to the croak in his voice, the way it keeps catching, the hitching jagged rise of his breathing.

“No. No, don't you get it, it's clear as fucking crystal. Because he _wanted_ a family, yeah, he _wanted_ kids he could dote on and take to the park and play football with. He just didn't want _me,_ did he? And what the hell was s-so wrong with me?! I wasn't – I wasn't a bad kid, I was quiet and I kept out of trouble, and there's _no, no_ reason he couldn't have taken me with him when he left. S-so what was so wrong with me?” Martin's shoulders are starting to shake. “Why – why wasn't I _enough_ for him?”

Jon surges in as Martin bursts into angry bitter tears. Sobbing into Jon's jumper, fisting his hands into the hem of it, repeating snatches of recrimination and confusion over and over. Jon tries to tell him that he's enough, that he's always been enough, that he's so so loved, but Martin can't hear over his own hitching breaths, the sea swell of his grief.

Jon just holds him and waits for the tide to go out.

* * *

The doorbell rings around nine o'clock, and Jon Knows who's at the door.

Martin stirs under the twisted covers with a questioning noise, but Jon shushes him.

“It's the postman,” he lies. “I'll get it.”

Martin hums.

“Put the kettle on?” he asks sleepily, as though he won't be back snoring in a minute. Jon promises he will regardless, manoeuvring himself out of the heat-packed bed and Martin's loose grip, slipping on his slippers and a shirt.

He opens the door with his most imperious of gazes already set on his face.

Martin is there. Or, a man uncanny in resemblance. He shifts his weight from foot to foot like Martin does, has the same nervous twitch in the flutter of his hands. His skin is more weathered, maybe, has built up a collection of lines Martin hasn't sourced out just yet, a further progression to the receding hairline that's beginning to retreat back at Martin's temples.

“I – um, is Martin in?”

“Yes.”

“Can – would I be able to – ?”

"No,” Jon replies. “He's still asleep.”

It's taken for the denial it's meant to be. Kenneth Blackwood makes an 'oh, right' with the same ringing nervous cast to his movements that Martin had when he first came to the Archives.

“It's...” he starts tentatively, and politely does not have his gaze stray too long on the scars on his hand, his face, his throat. “It's Jon, isn't it?”

“Jonathan Blackwood,” he responds, feeling the odd need to stake the territory here. “I'm Martin's husband.”

“Oh!” Kenneth replies, a little surprised “That's... that's good. I didn't know you took his name when you got.... That's... that's great.”

“It's a good name,” Jon responds, and his father gives a sad, crooked look.

“Not sure Martin would agree with you.”

“It's not my place to comment,” Jon counters, and Kenneth nods and replies with a: “Yeah. No, no, you're right.”

The cat has come up to the door out of curiosity and nudges at the back of his legs before deciding to stay indoors. Jon clears his throat, feeling the nip of early morning under the thin cotton of his nightwear.

“I wanted to – ” Kenneth Blackwood starts. “I wanted to apologise. I didn't keep a cool head yesterday, and he – he deserved my honesty, not my defensiveness.”

Jon gives nothing else, and Kenneth Blackwood continues, clearly grateful for the conversational opening.

“Look, I'm – I have to head back today. I live up near Preston these days. But I hoped – Can I leave my number? I know I shouldn't have pushed so hard. It was a lot to expect. He doesn't...” He makes a half-sigh. “Martin doesn't have to call. I won't contact him again, if that's what he wants. I just – I'm there. If he wants to give me the chance to get to know him again. But if he doesn't.... I understand.”

Jon takes the piece of card offered.

“I'll give it to him,” he says, firmly but not unkindly, and then gives a nod. “Drive back safe, Mr Blackwood.”

He takes it for the dismissal it is meant to be, and he returns the nod. Shoves his hands in his pockets to stave off the chill of the morning as he leaves.

Jon closes the front door with an unobtrusive click, pockets the card he was given. Pauses for a moment, listening to the lull of the house, the rumble of snoring upstairs. Then he makes his way past pots and paintbrushes into the kitchen to make Martin a cup of tea.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for: discussions of parental abandonment and emotional abuse, poor communication, intense unresolved issues and arguments, mentions of therapy


End file.
